2020 Playoff Bracket
We’ve now gone through all the teams in the 2020 Fantasy Astrology Baseball League in descending order of total fantasy points on the year. You can check out full lineups and pitching staffs for all 12 teams in the Gallery section. Once you’re done perusing that, let’s imagine what things might have looked like in a hypothetical playoff setting. With the four classical elements forming the four FABL divisions, it makes sense that the playoffs would be a final four-type situation. As a reminder, if you didn’t just look at the Gallery, those teams would be Aquarius vs. Leo in the Positive Polarity, and Virgo vs. Cancer in the Negative Polarity. Here’s what a bracket would look like, with the home teams for each series on top.
Up to this point, I had been using fantasy point totals to determine division winners. Obviously for that method, you don’t have to worry about selecting lineups for any particular game: after the season is over, you just look at the full list of players, pick the highest-scoring ones, and add up their points. But when we’re talking about a simulation setting, such as these playoffs would be, we have to start getting a little more creative. And it also gives me a chance to talk about one of my favorite parts of baseball: batting orders!
To determine batting orders, I look at each player’s “Splits” on their Baseball Reference page. This subsection breaks down full-season stats into various categories: vs. left-handed or right-handed pitching, home or away, month by month, by pitch count, and by batting order positions (among many others). Obviously a player’s spot in the batting order depends a lot on the real-life lineup surrounding them, and also on whims of the manager/front office, etc. But it’s a good starting point to bring these fantasy astrology lineups to life. Here’s what the lineups might look like for a potential best-of-seven playoff series in the Positive Polarity.
As impressive as the upstart Aquarius offense was in 2020, I don’t know if the non-Jose Abreu contingent would be able to hold their own against Cy Young Award runner-up Yu Darvish (in both the NL and the PP) and tough-as-nails veteran ace Max Scherzer. Conversely, despite their impressive seasons, I could see relatively unproven starting pitchers like Marco Gonzales and Zach Plesac getting chewed up by Leo stars like Mike Trout and Anthony Rizzo. But if Aquarius could take a lead into the late innings, there’s no one I’d rather have on the mound than new White Sox closer Liam Hendriks.
The most important thing to note about the Negative Polarity playoffs is that the Virgo lineup is different than the one I put forth in my recap post for the sign. When I took my initial pass through the database, for some reason I didn’t think to put the versatile Jose Ramirez at second base - a position he played extensively in the mid-2010’s. This would allow Maikel Franco to slide to third and thus open up DH for consummate professional Paul Goldschmidt (moving Max Muncy to the bench in the process). We had already established that VIR had a handy lead over CAN for the first seed in the NP, but this just goes to show that it’s good to revisit these lineups every now and then to guard against human error.
I thought this old-timey typewritter style font would be good for the Virgo jerseys, but any astrology experts can let me know if I’m wrong.
As far as who would win in a head-to-head series against these two signs, it’s honestly closer than you might think. Virgo has a slightly better top end in both offense and pitching, and it’s hard to beat Gerrit Cole when you’re talking pure game 1 starters. But Dinelson Lamet was right there with him in terms of fantasy points, and the Cancer lineup is fearsome all the way through, with Tim Anderson, Brandon Lowe, and Charlie Blackmon comprising a secondary 1-2-3, if you look at their most common 2020 batting order positions. Nick Anderson technically didn’t pitch enough innings to qualify, but a) the pandemic-shortened season plays havoc with any eligibility guidelines, and b) I’m always willing to bend the rules for closer-types who racked up a significant amount of saves, even if they fall short of my arbitrary innings threshold.
Assuming the top two seeds would advance to a hypothetical FABL World Series, it would still be a very close matchup. Aquarius has the statistical edge in all three areas (offense, rotation, and bullpen), but there’s something about the star power on this particular Virgo team that makes me wary to count them out. But what a great story it would be if a sign that has never once finished in the top half of the Fantasy Astrology Baseball League in the last 50 years were to emerge from a pandemic and take home their first ever FABL championship? Let’s just go ahead and pretend that’s what happened. After all, the numbers do bear it out…
Next time, I’ll begin my trip back through time by looking at the 2019 Fantasy Astrology Baseball League season, the last time we had a full 162-game sample size… and the last time many of us experienced any type of normality in our lives…